It shouldn’t be surprising that Cristina Fernandez is a little disillusioned with the protest community in Canada.

Growing up in Chile, Fernandez was used to massive left-wing demonstrations, grassroots protest movements and broad solidarity. When she moved north, this was replaced by smaller, more reserved protests and an underlying self-focus from the middle-class intellectuals and university students who dominate the scene.

Fernandez is not alone in her frustrations. This may come as a shock to those who’ve seen the Canadian protest scene getting more and more vibrant over the last several years, but context is everything. And many Latin American activists are finding that the frigid Canadian context does little to light the fire of rebellion.

While attending what she calls a “touchy-feely” post-September-11 meeting at City Hall in Toronto, Fernandez and several others decided that the anti-war movement needed more than a couple of speeches to have an effect. “The meeting was a total fucking waste of time. We wanted action,” says Fernandez.

That action came in the form of the Coalition Against War and Racism (CAWAR), a group formed out of the more vocal members in attendance that night. Since then, the coalition has made it their mission to bring their anti-war message to the masses through creative methods of activism such as guerilla theatre.

CAWAR is also trying to broaden the meaning of protest in Canada, consistently doing community outreach to make people aware of issues instead of just sloganeering during protests. This concept of making every day a revolutionary one is still new to many Canadians, where raging against authority is literally a scheduled event.

“The key is to relate [your struggle to] all the other struggles,” says Jacobo Alban, a young activist and member of CAWAR who came to Canada from Colombia four years ago. “You have to do more than just fight multinationals.”

The activists have also had to fight the subtle — and not-so-subtle — racism of the West, where being from a third world nation has often led to second-class treatment. Fernandez recalls a meeting where some of her Canadian counterparts suggested staging anti-Kananaskis protests in Toronto, because they assumed she couldn’t afford to go all the way to Alberta. “I own a van,” she quips.

Alban concurs, noting that the attitude can be seen in media coverage as well. While the death of a European protester at the G-8 summit in Genoa, July 2001, was international news, the massive media interest was telling. “In all protests in Colombia, people get killed,” Alban says.

But relating the struggles of the third world to first world protesters has been difficult for the activists. Simply put, Canada’s history is vastly different from those of South America, where left-wing parties play leading roles on the political stage and workers’ rallies gather tens of thousands at a time.

Pat Laso, an anti-racist activist, remembers those marches from his native Chile. “There you’ll have kids that are fifteen that say ‘yeah, I’m a communist.’ Here it’s a subculture; there it’s a part of the culture.”

For Pablo Vivanco, also a Chilean-Canadian and a member of the Young Left, that means getting protest tips from what in Canada would seem an unlikely source, his mother. “When I went to Quebec [for the Summit of the Americas], my mother told me different ways of not getting tear-gassed,” he said. She had worked as a nurse in Chile.

True, there aren’t as many opportunities to get tear-gassed in Canada. But it’s more than that. Across Canada, recent right-leaning governments have provided ample fodder for increased political activity, yet protests have still largely been run in an orderly fashion — so orderly that police are often consulted or, as in the case of tuition protests organized by student groups on university campuses in recent years, protesters police (or “marshal”) themselves.

“It’s almost understandable considering the standard of living here,” says Laso, who has seen formerly militant protesters soften in Canada’s middle-class culture. No doubt, the passion of activism can be quelled by the security of our lives, our creature comforts. Issues in Canada rarely come down to matters of life and death for the middle-class majority, and these protesters aren’t in general willing to ruffle too many feathers despite the relative safety in doing so — even on their worst days, no one could compare Canadian police with a Chilean death squad.

“The worst thing that happens is you spend the night in jail,” says Tim Falconer, author of Watchdogs and Gadflies, a book about different members of the Canadian protest movement. And when protests are organized around issues such as tuition freezes, instead of, say, combating Pinochet’s military dictatorship, a sharp divide becomes apparent.

For Fernandez, a fire will always burn inside from remembering what living under real oppression in Pinochet’s Chile was like. “There was so much trauma, you were touched by it no matter what,” she says. Although that all seems a world away from Canada, Fernandez believes that the fight against brutal repression is everyone’s. To see why, you need only look to U.S. foreign policy and to where the globalization movement is attempting to take root. “Latin America is the U.S.’s wet dream,” she says. “That’s where the neo-liberal policies have been implemented most aggressively.” It’s where the International Monetary Fund applies full pressure to embattled governments, like in Venezuela, to privatize industry and maintain a “tight monetary policy.”

Although the anti-globalization movement has certainly found popularity in Canada, the next step, say many South American activists, is the most important one.

“Right now I don’t think people know what to do,” says Vivanco. The protests haven’t effected much change. “There’s a lack of institutional resistance in Canada,” he says, where the NGOs and community organization doing grassroots work won’t cross a certain line, lest they jeopardize much needed-government funding. In South America, community centres often serve as bases not only for education but for revolt.

Vivanco also points out that “people use protest as a litmus test, and I don’t think it’s necessarily indicative of the movement.” Indeed, while protests make the evening news, it’s the daily, behind-the-scenes work and a diversity of actions that make a movement.

Canadians are certainly catching on. With more direct actions such as the housing squats that have been attempted from Halifax to Vancouver taking place lately, Vivanco believes that change is on the horizon in Canada. “Things are bound to hit the fan,” he says. “There’s bound to be change.”

With the influence of activists like him, the change may even, ahem, snowball.